Management: Eurozone and Member Countries

School of Management
Accountability, Representation & Control (MN7262)

Discuss whether the concepts of accountability, representation and control can help explain the Euro crisis. Use course materials in your answer.

GAO LU

Student number 120938023

Date: 13 January 2013

Totur: Paul Brook & Geoff Lightfoot

Word account: 2733
1. Introduction

ARC (Accountability, representation and control) can be treated as a process of management. In fact, in order to make sense those three words, it would be best to divide this process into four parts, accounting, accountability, representation and control.

Accounting is a kind of activities which started from ancient times. when people know how to keep information, they began to find ways to keep those information and want to show others, such as the mural which can keep a scene for other people to see what happened in that particular moment and use shell to do account activities. In other words, accounting is a human activity which uses a “thing” represents another original one, and this practice, which can be called the process of representing (Lightfoot 2012. P. 3). However, the “thing” we often use is not completely the truth, like Armstrong (2002) mentioned, the accounting activities are not like a printer to copy the reality, it does not just show you the accounting report to give you a statement that maybe the truth, or maybe not. Armstrong (2002) prefers to treat accounting as a social activity, in his theory, social element such as human understanding, personal interest and social environment can greatly affect accounting activities, because the account report must be read by someone, and the contained information should be used by those specific people in order to know the general situation and then make decisions (Yong, 2006 cited in Paton and Littleton, 1940). Throughout the whole process, it may be a question about whether the information can be trusted or not. In other words, do the accountants record the “right” thing in the accounting statement? As the article mentioned above, accounting activities need to serves a specific interest and different social understandings. Lightfoot (2013, P. 4) found “representation is rarely neutral, or impartial. The construction of a representation works in the interest of one party”. Which means there is actually no right or wrong accounting activities, if the statement has less usefulness for one group, it does not mean this statement have no value for other specific groups. For these reasons, all accounting activities must cater to someone’s interest, and this satisfaction is what can be called accountability. What’s more, in order to keeps the process showing the more reliable data, managers always try to monitor it, as Brook (2012) said the concept of control is how the managers follow all the activities during the accounting process and show their power and authority. The recent Euro crisis is absolutely huge disaster for the whole euro zone, and also shows big influence for the world’s economy. For this reason, people are trying to use their own knowledge to explain it. In ARC way, it is better to analyze it through state governance and euro institution. Just treat the state and the euro zone as a big organization, and find what extend the ARC effect the cause the euro crisis. The first part of this essay will discuss background of the Euro crisis, and the second part will emphasize the Greek government and how the crisis first happened in Greece. In the third part, the essay will use ARC knowledge to show problems in the euro system and analyze the consequence of this problem. Finally, in conclusion, some advice will be given after a short summary.

2. Background
The crisis started from the Greece. When people talked about the euro debt crisis, the first thought that came to mind was blame Greece. Just as the Greek Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos...

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